Blockchain can stamp out fake news and rebuild trust in mass media

Fact-checking agencies are in charge of verifying facts and claims in the news that may be distorted in the process of rewriting or for any political purposes. The news text may consist of truthful information written in a neutral format peculiar to the news, but one sentence may contain a false fact or claim whose origin is unknown. In addition, the state itself has begun to produce false information, as was the case with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s famous Twitter account.

The main strength of fake news is the rapid speed with which it disseminates. While false information has always existed, the internet makes it worse every year. The high speed of fake news sharing has the potential to directly affect public relations and have serious political and economic consequences that are sometimes difficult to predict. This is not to mention that it has become difficult to trace the original source and at what iteration true news might have become false.

Why is it so difficult to fight fake news?

Public literacy can help in the fight against false information, as online news is often characterized by unverified facts and a lack of originality. Today, it is very easy to create a misleading message or article: You just need a digital platform for the first publication, then fake news is spread by users themselves, and their number increases exponentially.

Also, the publication of fake news often generates profits for the platform owners through embedded advertising, and they are in no hurry to give up this way of generating revenue. Another problem is the misinterpretation of the source of the news. For example, a city government issues an ordinance about new restrictions because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the media can interpret this differently for the sake of traffic, clickbait and uniqueness. Any fact-checker will advise you in such a case to “always see the source.” In reality, there is no guarantee that the user will do so because the news flow is enormous and there is no time or habit to check everything.

Technologies against fake news

In addition to manual fact-checking, there are technologies for fighting fake news, like automated source finding, or an anti-plagiarism system. Sometimes fake-news producers manage to obfuscate such systems when the original source is lost.

There are more projects and studies about using various machine learning techniques to identify inaccurate information. These projects are most often based on stylistic analysis of texts and a model that has been trained on fake-news text examples. Nonetheless, there are also limitations here, such as the collection and markup of the database, as it is a very time-consuming process. Also, in many publications that sin with false news, the style of news with false information is not different from that of news with truthful information.

The same applies to bloggers on social media platforms. That said, there are examples of successful projects, such as when Twitter acquired a British artificial intelligence-based startup to help it combat the amount of fake news being spread on its platform.

How can blockchain help?

First of all, because of the very principle of its operation. A distributed ledger system involves not only the secure storage of data and the use of cryptographic encryption but also the impossibility of arbitrary changes. Smart contracts store text, images/videos and their sources on a blockchain. Anything that goes into the registry will have source data, namely who posted a particular news item — whether it be an article, photo or video — and who the source is of a particular quote. This is relevant, for example, for news agencies or government press releases whose information may be distorted when disseminated by other media.

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